Getting it in the Head Read online

  Looking across at the three of them then I suddenly got real depressed. It welled up in me like vapour and I could feel the tears burning at the back of my eyes. There was my mother, a miserable, deluded thing, and my father, trying hard and always failing to assert control. And then there was my brother, Owl, the centre of the world since the first day he’d happened into it. I hated every one of them then, hated them for being there and for being what they were and for bringing me into the world and for bringing Owl into the world also and making it a worse place. And I hated myself for hating and in short I hated the whole world and everything in it. I could see Dad was getting impatient. At last he came out with his single-word question.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well, it seems that Owl has gone and done it this time. Jamie’s dead, he’s lying out the back of Coen’s with a bolt in his head.’

  Mom let out a wail, a sound like a door hinge needing oil, and clasped Owl closer to her.

  ‘My baby, my baby.’

  Dad moved behind them to embrace them both. I drank tea on the other side of the table. Owl began to struggle from Mom’s grasp, doing that complicated stroke again, a swimmer coming through mire.

  ‘Do you think they’ll get me?’ His face was lined with worry.

  It crossed my mind to frighten the shit out of him then, to tell him that it was only a matter of a few days before forensics traced him and the cops came to haul him away and send him down for a good long stretch in a place where there was no Mom or Dad or books. For the first time in my life I could have taken the upper hand over him then, I could have had him dangling like a worm on a hook. But I was tired of the whole thing, so tired I hadn’t got the heart.

  ‘Even if they find out it was you, and they probably will, they can’t do anything. You’re too young; besides, it was an accident.’ Why did I make it so easy for him then, why did I not torment him? Was it just fatigue or somewhere deep in myself did I sympathize with his awful misfortune? Despite myself, did some mysterious blood affinity come to hand and lend real gentleness to my attitude? I didn’t want to examine it. Maybe I was just plain scared. Owl was looking at me like he had never seen me before and I just wanted to get out of his way.

  ‘I’m going to bed. There’s nothing more we can do tonight.’

  ‘We’re all going to bed,’ Dad said resolutely. He had picked up Owl out of Mom’s arms. Owl’s head had begun to loll to one side and his eyes were closed already. How could he have fallen asleep so quickly?

  Dad carried him up the stairs behind me and laid him on the bed. He was like a rag doll, soggy with sleep. I helped take off his boots and jeans just so that Dad would leave the room and leave us alone. I didn’t want to talk, I just wanted to go to sleep as quickly as possible. Eventually he took off Owl’s glasses and pulled the quilt over his still body. He stood looking down at him for a few moments. I pulled off my jacket and T-shirt over my head. I was sitting on the bed unlacing my boots, purposely ignoring him, when he turned to me.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be all right? I mean, Owl, he’ll be OK?’

  I looked at him in disbelief. I couldn’t believe he was looking for an opinion from me or that he could be interested in anything I might have to say. But he looked real shaken, uprooted even, slumped and with his hair all over the place. His whole appearance was that of a man left out in a strong wind. I wanted to tell him to fuck off there and then, tell him that it had nothing to do with me. He was my father, our father, he could cope with it, that’s what fathers were for, that was why they got to make speeches about good manners and achievements and shit like that. Now was his time to be a real father. Part of me wanted to say all these things and another part of me just felt sorry for him. He looked kinda pathetic standing there in his vest and trousers. He looked slumped, like his centre of gravity had slipped. I didn’t like seeing him like that, I preferred him when he was ranting and raving and giving out. I knew where I stood with him then, I could understand him, not like now. This pathetic version of my old man had me completely wrong-footed. I just wished he would leave me alone quickly.

  ‘It’ll be OK,’ I said finally. ‘There’s nothing anyone can do to him. The whole thing was an accident.’ He just stood there looking at me for a moment, then nodded his head solemnly.

  ‘I suppose you’re right, things will look better in the morning. We’ll be able to think straight after a few hours’ sleep. God rest poor Jamie.’ He paused for a moment and then shambled from the room. ‘Goodnight.’

  I lay staring at the ceiling. It must have been getting on towards five then, the first rays of sunlight had begun to glow in the window. I began to think of Jamie lying there in the grass with the bolt through his eye and the trickle of blood running into his ear. I wondered, how did he feel at the moment of death? Were there fireworks and brilliant lights like we are led to believe from the telly, and then a sudden shutdown to complete darkness? Or was there a slow fade of images to a grey, blank screen that just buzzed on and on and on till it made you want to scream but couldn’t? One thing was certain now; in spite of him never having completed his schooling and despite how few books he’d read, Jamie now had more answers than I or anyone else alive. Right now there wasn’t a wiser man on the planet than Jamie Harkin. That struck me as a funny sort of deal. You could have all the answers you needed, the only problem was that you paid for them with your life, the very thing you needed the answers for in the first place. Talk about giving with one hand and taking away with the other. I remembered reading somewhere that life is a sort of trap, it gives you cancer and it ends in tears but try leaving home without it. But now I know that life is a joke, a joke we’ve heard a million times before with death as the punchline we can see coming a mile off.

  I began to have a vision then of Jamie being welcomed into his own death. There was this stage and a comedian in a suit and frilly shirt, his elbow resting on the mike stand. He puts his arm around Jamie, full of bonhomie, playing to the gallery. But Jamie’s bewildered, he’s looking around him, wondering where he is, asking all the time, ‘Where are the answers? That’s what I’m here for – the answers.’ Silence descends on the auditorium. This is not supposed to happen. Jamie is supposed to show his teeth, grin and bear with the farce but obviously he knows nothing about it or he hasn’t taken the time to read his lines, before being called from the audience. There’s this funny querulous look on his face. And the comedian is pissed off big time. Once again the volunteer from the audience has refused to co-operate. With his arm still around his shoulder and grinning all the time, the comedian leads Jamie back to his seat, whispering in his ear as he does, ‘Fuck you, kid, if you can’t take a joke.’

  I must have fallen asleep thinking these thoughts because next thing I was awake, looking across the room and seeing Owl’s head on the pillow. Straight away my memory filled up with images of the night before. I leapt out of bed. I needed fags and my mouth ached for a drink. Going downstairs and moving through the house I knew that it was deserted but for me and Owl. My watch read half eleven: Mom and Dad would be at work. I grabbed my jacket and checked it for money. It yielded twelve pounds and some small change, enough for fags and a few pints. I was set up for the day.

  Outside, our little town was filling up. It was Tuesday, dole day, and the square was full of cars from the surrounding area bringing in farmers to sign on. Burly men with tanned faces walked through the streets in shirt sleeves, laughing, throwing wisecracks back and forth. Some were obviously in a hurry to sign on and return home to silage-making or turf-cutting while this good weather held. Others were more anxious to get their money and have a few quick pints before leaving. The whole town throbbed with life.

  I bought fags and stood outside the shop, unwrapping them in the sunlight. I couldn’t get them out fast enough, my hands were shaking, a nicotine fit first thing in the morning. I lit one and sucked deep and it sickened me, the way the first one always does. I closed my eyes and gradually my body soaked up the nausea. Th
e rich smoke filled out my lungs, stiffened my whole skeleton and within moments I was ready to meet the day. Mom keeps on at me about smoking, telling me my clothes reek and my hands are stained and I look like shit. Then she tells me that I have to look after my heart – there have been a handful of casualties on both sides of the family who have been stricken down with dodgy hearts. She keeps telling me about some documentary she’s seen on how Ireland has the third highest rate of heart disease in the developed world with a way higher than normal rate here in the west. Seemingly we eat too much food, drink too much drink and smoke too much smoke. I’m glad she didn’t see the one on the rate of mental disorder here in the west. Now that was a sorry story. Anyway I’m going to keep on smoking for as long as I can. It’s one of the few things I enjoy. Fuck the heart is what I say, try and enjoy life. Stay alive when you’re alive and make sure people can tell the difference when you’re dead.

  I stubbed out the fag. My mouth felt like sandpaper. I thought I might chance a pint. Normally I wouldn’t drink so early in my home town – I wouldn’t be up, for one thing and besides it draws too much attention. Drink a pint before twelve o’clock here and people are giving you a subscription to the Betty Ford clinic. But now there was a crowd in town I thought I just might get away with it. Besides, it was near twelve; after the angelus was thought to be a respectable time.

  I walked across the street, into the pub facing me. I was lucky. There was a nice crowd, not too packed and a few vacant stools. Most of the men drank standing up, trying to give the impression that they were just there for the one and on the verge of leaving, their conscience not fully at ease. I took a stool at the far end of the bar facing the door and called for a pint. The pub was full of talk, a gale of words followed by squalls of laughter, a kindly turbulence. The topics of conversation were simple ones: the weather, its beauty and unpredictability, the wetness of the bogs and the difficulty of bringing machinery into them; football, Mayo’s tradition of spectacularly gifted but temperamentally fragile players; cattle, the likelihood of poor prices for them in the autumn and the probability of our whole area being rezoned as an EC disadvantaged area. Apart from the football I hadn’t much interest in any of it, but I sat listening to their words anyway. These men were a different species to me. They seemed so full of a substance I would never have a fraction of. They were real men, full of real certainties and preoccupations, full of strength. I had a desperate feeling of incompleteness among them. I felt like a fragment left over from some disaster or a sketch towards some future project. I had none of their wholeness. As I listened to their words I had an urge to finish my drink and leave. But I didn’t. I hoped that the longer I stayed in their midst hearing their words and their laughter, the closer I would come to having some of their completion. Maybe some of their secret would rub off on me. I was hoping too that Owl would be up and out of the house when I got back to get something to eat. I didn’t want to see his face any sooner than I had to.

  Without me noticing, the conversation of a few men with their backs to me had changed. They were talking about Jamie. One of them was telling how he’d heard about his death in the cop station when he’d left in his dole form.

  ‘Christ, it’s shocking what can happen, even in a small town like this. The poor child hadn’t a clue what hit him.’ He spoke with real wonder in his voice. ‘How the hell did a young child know enough to rig up an explosion like that? Seemingly a big piece was blown out of the wall along with the roof and a couple of windows.’ He was a thin man with long sideburns and he had suddenly become the centre of attention in the whole pub. The attention didn’t seem to rest easily on him. He shrugged his shoulders quickly. ‘That’s what I’m told anyway.’ He slugged his pint and sought to disappear into the background of those about him. The pub was filled with words again, everyone expressing the same disbelief.

  ‘Someone other than a child had to be responsible.’

  Another agreed. ‘No child would be smart enough to put something like that together.’

  ‘That’s for sure.’

  ‘It had to be someone older and smarter.’

  I was suddenly disappointed with the whole lot of them. They were just like my parents: tenants in a fools’ paradise, totally blind and without imagination to see that the world could puke up something like Owl, a creature ready-formed with his own venom. This was what you got for spending your life here in the west of Ireland, on the edge of the world – a thin imagination, a narrow mind that had huge chunks of the world falling down each side of it. Owl was one of those chunks, something so outlandish that even if they saw him rigging up the explosion with their own eyes they would not have been able to believe it. Owl was outside the compass of their imagination and that’s all there was to it. I could listen to no more. I took my jacket and passed through the throng into the street.

  V

  When I woke there was no one in the room but myself. I walked through the house and it too was deserted. I made breakfast and sat at the kitchen table eating a bowl of cereal, wondering what I was going to do with the day. I badly wanted to go back to the site of the explosion and have a look at the wreckage in the plain light of day. I decided against it though. In fact I decided against going outside at all that day. It seemed best to stay inside for a couple of days and lie low till the panic of Jamie’s death blew over. Try not to draw any attention, that was the thing.

  It seemed funny to have a whole day ahead of me that wasn’t in some way concerned with my bomb. A whole day seemed such a huge length of time, white and empty, waiting to be filled. It was like a big hole stretching down and down into the day. If I wasn’t careful I might fall into it and never be seen again. I had to bring all my concentration to bear on the problem. I decided that after breakfast, which was coming to an end but which I was going to stretch out with a glass of milk, a banana and a comic, I was going to look at the telly. It would be open now and there would be cartoons on for a few hours. That would pass some time until Mom and Dad came home. They would have news for me and I would be able to plan my day after hearing it. I was beginning to feel like some sort of outlaw holed up in his hideaway, waiting for news and supplies from his outlaw friends. That thought pleased me and just to add to the effect I went to the window and looked out on the day through a chink in the curtains. The town was full and I remembered it was dole day. That worried me. For some reason I wanted the town to be deserted, no people at all, just blank streets. If these people stayed around all day I would not feel safe leaving the house. I thought about that for a while, about how I would never be able to leave the house and how my parents would have to tell the neighbours I had gone away somewhere. I would get older and bigger, never leaving the house and reading all the time just to keep myself educated and abreast of things. Then one night, when I was big enough and had read enough, I would walk out in the dead of night to make my way in the world, a tall, white giant whom the sun had never shone on. That was all rubbish and I knew it but it was good fun thinking it for a few moments.

  I got my milk and banana and sat on the couch to watch telly. When it came on it was a Road Runner cartoon and as usual the coyote was laying a trap for the Road Runner. He had a wooden crate of explosives with ACME EXPLOSIVES stencilled on the side. He was going to use them to blow up a tunnel and trap the Road Runner inside. But as usual the Road Runner was too fast and the coyote was plain stupid. The explosives didn’t go off until the coyote went into the tunnel to check. Tons of rock came down on him and he had to dig himself out all bruised and battered, only to have the Road Runner laughing at him and making that stupid beep beep noise. That coyote sickens me. All that hardware and explosives and no brains. What I would have done is brought a shotgun with me into the tunnel and stayed under the pile of rubble until curiosity got the better of him and he came in to have a look. I’d rise up then out of the rubble with both barrels blazing; that would put an end to that stupid beep beep noise.

  I turned off the telly, it was boring
me. I began to wander through the house in the semi-darkness, drinking more milk, looking for something to do. I thought how empty a house is when you are looking for something to do. I thought about reading a book, I hadn’t done that in a few days. But I didn’t feel like it. What I really wanted to do was to go to the shed and have a look at what our explosion had done to it. I regretted that I hadn’t stayed a moment longer after the bomb had gone off to take in all the details. I couldn’t remember much about it now; the panic of seeing Jamie lying on the ground seemed to have done something to my short-term memory. All I could remember was the bang and then Jamie lying there and then legging it through the garden. What a waste. All that work and planning and I couldn’t remember a thing of it.

  I was in a huff then, pissed off with the whole situation. I decided to go the cupboard under the stairs and get out my favourite game. I needed some way to pass this terrible time until my parents came home and this game seemed just the thing. The game is called Axis and Allies and it’s the best game in the world. You play it with two to six people and it’s very complicated, lots of rules and so on, but basically what you do is, using dice and strategy, you move your ships and armies around the board, which is a map of the world, in such a way as to capture the enemies’ cities – London and Washington or Berlin and Peking. I’ve been playing this game for nearly three years now and I still like it. What I like about it is the mixture of luck and strategy. You have to use your head but even if you do you never know when your luck will run out. One bad throw of the dice and it could be all over no matter how smart you are. Besides, it’s the only game my brother will play with me now. We used to play cards and other games once but I used to beat the crap out of him always. He just hasn’t got the concentration for games. For some reason this is the only game he’s stuck with. There must be something in it that he likes. Whatever the reason, over the last few months he’s become damn good at it. I used to be able to beat him with my eyes closed. But not any more. These last few games have been neck and neck. Some have gone on for days and some have had to be abandoned in stalemate. He seems to enjoy playing me now that he has the measure of me.